The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago, when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson’s rich storytelling gifts rivet us with the sights, colors, and feelings of a bygone era. That summer of 1911 a new king was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. But perfection was not for all. Cracks in the social fabric were showing. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes. Temperatures rose steadily to more than 100 degrees; by August deaths from heatstroke were too many for newspapers to report. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources and narrated through the eyes of a series of exceptional individuals–among them a debutante, a choirboy, a politician, a trade unionist, a butler, and the queen–The Perfect Summer is a vividly rendered glimpse of the twilight of the Edwardian era.

Cinematographer Gianni di Venanzo’s masterful use of Technicolor transforms Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini’s first color feature, into a kaleidoscope of dreams, spirits, and memories. Giulietta Masina plays a betrayed wife whose inability to come to terms with reality leads her along a hallucinatory journey of self-discovery. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the fully restored version of one of Fellini’s most dazzling dreams.

Juliet lives in a beautiful house by the ocean. Her sisters, and especially her Mother overshadow her with their beauty. She is a spiritual, superstitious and naive woman. She visits a psychic seer who tells her she must follow the sex trade in order to be happy. Not long after she meets her eccentric and sexy neighbour, Suzy, who, by all counts appears to be a high class prostitute and encourages Juilet into sexual acts which make her guilty and nervous. A rare night when her husband is at home she wakes up to catch him talking to another woman on the phone. He calls out the name "Gabriella" while sleeping, but when she questions him he lies his way out of it. She finds out who Gabriella is and fears her husband will leave her. Juliet begins having visions who accuse and terrorize her. The pinnacle of the visions comes at the end where it is implied she realizes she would be better off without her husband and is ultimately emotionally emancipated.

Ernest Ansermet was in the peak of his directorial power in this decade. The real effort to guide and elevate the Suisse Romande to the most famous swiss orchestra ever was made for this admirable and not yet recognized conductor. Ansermet had a special rapport for the Russian composers. In this recording we have the presence of the virtuosi violinist Ruggiero Ricci characterized with a cold temperament but gifted with a steel sound extremely adequate for this works, giving his best musical achievement of his brilliant career with both Prokoviev violin concertos.

Good news! Five of Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava's Black Saint and Soul Note recordings have been reissued by CAM Jazz in one of those pretty white box sets with each LP reproduced as a separate CD tucked into a miniature record jacket. Born at Trieste in 1939, Rava later attributed his lifelong pursuit of modern jazz to the influence of Miles Davis. One might add Don Cherry and Freddie Hubbard to that equation, along with maybe Richard Williams and Lee Morgan. In order to fully comprehend what he was up to from the '70s onward, it is important to consider the artistic company that Rava kept during the ‘60s. Take a moment, for example, to ponder the blended influences of Chet Baker and Gato Barbieri.

This 35 disc set is jam packed with thrilling, beautiful - and superbly recorded - music.Tchaikovsky's "Big Three" are very well represented here. Dutoit's lushly lyrical and dramatic "Swan Lake", Bonynge's affectionate and inspired "Sleeping Beauty" (listen out for grumpy Carabosse's distant thunder rumbling in the Act II Symphonic Entr'acte!) and a version of "The Nutcracker" - Bychkov and the Berlin Philharmonic, which is brilliant, full of character and sparkle.